The exodus approaches...

[sholio]

First, before I type anything else - I just realized that I never thanked the people who nominated me for Stargate fan awards. So ... THANK YOU, wonderful people! I'm so sorry it took me so long to say so! *bows in your general direction*

Anyway, moving on ... Dreamwidth (new fandom-friendly journaling platform) has announced their open beta dates (accounts will be available April 30).

[Poll #1374680]

I've been watching my f'list abuzz with this, and feeling ... mildly conflicted.

Since 1995, a significant amount of my social life has been online. In that time, I can think of three different online "places" off the top of my head (a mailing list, a message board, and LJ) that I've thought of as "home" at the time. In all three cases, I spent years there, made enduring friendships and business contacts, shared major developments in my life ... and (except for LJ, yet) eventually moved on, as the group splintered and scattered.

I've also participated in, and sometimes run, dozens of mailing lists, message boards and blogs; I've had at least a half-dozen different message boards and blogs on my own webspace (none of which really took off, though some were pretty active for a short while).

So the thought never occurred to me that LJ would be permanent, any more than I expect the house I live in now to be the house I live in until I die. At the same time, though, I don't particularly want to move. I'm comfy, I have everything set up the way I like it, and most of my currently active online social circle is here. But I can feel the winds of change blowing; whether I stay or go or straddle both sites, I suspect that fandom (at least the corner of fandom where I "live") is about to split and reshape itself again. I've certainly been around long enough to know that this is normal and inevitable; fandom changes and reshapes all the time. I was kinda behind the curve on LJ fandom; I didn't really get active here until it was already going full-bore, so there was a (deceptive) sense of permanence to LJ fandom for me -- in Internet terms, it was ancient and rock-solid when I first jumped in, not to mention that I got in on the new, hot fandom (SGA) while it was on a popularity upswing. Compared to the Internet at large, it seemed monumentally stable and permanent. There were very few dead links, and lots of lively, active journals and discussions -- it felt like you could link to a story on an LJ journal and expect to still be there several years later, which is a sort of permanence that didn't really exist back in the days of personal Geocities homepages and mailing list archives.

Now I'm starting to notice growing numbers of blogs that are struckthrough in older comment threads; dead links leading to posts that have been privatized and journals that no longer exist; communities with tons of posts in their archives but not much activity now. I don't really get the feeling that LJ fandom is winding down, exactly, but it's starting to feel ... impermanent, in a way that it didn't before.

So ... I'm conflicted. Right now I'm leaning towards some combination of "maintain a Dreamwidth journal for reading purposes" and "let's see where fandom goes". I'm pretty much in it for the social life; all I really want is a journaling platform that'll basically leave me alone to do my thing -- and I know that LJ isn't perfect, but my own experiences with it have been good, despite some of the stories I've heard. I don't mind leaving -- like I said, I'm not wedded to the place -- but I'm in no great hurry to leave, either. I basically just want to be where the interesting discussions and the people I care about can be found.

Comments

[livrelibre.livejournal.com]

I've never had a fandom place that's felt especially like home until I landed on LJ and that's mostly here because the community's here. I'm looking forward to a site I feel more investment in system-wise and wouldn't mind paying for so I'm planning on shifting to Dreamwidth but I'll be cross posting here, esp. since it's free and I'm betting that fandom won't leave LJ entirely. It'll probably spread out across here, Dreamwidth and IJ, which is fine 'cause hey OpenID. If it had fragmented back into individual blogs and archives and lists or whatever else that came along that wasn't so easily cross-compatible I'd be a lot more worried.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

It'll probably spread out across here, Dreamwidth and IJ, which is fine 'cause hey OpenID. If it had fragmented back into individual blogs and archives and lists or whatever else that came along that wasn't so easily cross-compatible I'd be a lot more worried.

*nods* Yeah, the interoperability is really fantastic, and I think you're probably right that the ability to interact cross-platform is going to do a lot to prevent a mass scattering.

I'm really curious now what the patterns of media fandom migration would actually look like over the last decade or two. The changes have been so huge, and many of the fans that I'm friends with now have been in fandom for 10 or 15 years or longer, but in different parts of it than where *I* was 10 or 15 years ago. And I've drifted out of touch with many of the people that I used to know in other fannish venues. LJ is actually one of the things that's kept me from losing touch completely with some of the people I used to know; they left message boards for LJ at about the same time that I did, so even though we're in different fandoms now, we still have that way of keeping in touch.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

For the time being, I plan to treat it like I do IJ. I will crosspost there and read my flist there, but still consider LJ my main journal. However, while IJ is a step down, DW is a step up in many ways (ways I'm really excited about), so it may be that I'll start eventually considering DW my main journal and this will be the one I crosspost to.

I don't think I'll ever abandon this LJ altogether, because I have lots of people on my flist who are not part of media fandom, and some who are not part of fandom, period. So while I can expect that a good chunk of the media fandom folks might move over, I doubt these others will.

And like you, I've never had any problems with LJ personally, so I still feel a lot of love for this site and have been happy to pay for an account. If it weren't for the neat changes DW has made, I would be really reluctant to move at all (that's why I never seriously considered moving to IJ, just crossposting to keep up with friends who moved).

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

At least in the beginning, I'll probably treat it similarly to how I treat IJ as well -- in my case, this means having a (mostly) empty DW journal for commenting and flist-tracking, but continuing to do my blogging over here. In the future, who knows? I do agree that DW looks good; you can tell the codebase was put together by people who use the service and care about what their users want from it. I'm going to have to play with it and see whether I like it well enough to make the switch. Since I'm mostly here for the social interaction at least as much as the blogging (I could run a blog on my own webspace easily enough if that was all I wanted), it'll probably matter a lot to me whether my flist drifts over there or stays put, though...

[auburnnothenna.livejournal.com]

I'm so conflicted. I don't trust to any sort of permanence with LJ, I kind of dislike the way it's run, I really don't like that it is owned out of Russia, but I came into LJ when it was still invite codes, my first experiences of fandom pretty much coincides within a couple months of that, and I have this huge damn flist. There's the nostalgia factor and the inertia factor.

I have a permanent account at InsaneJournal. I like the way IJ is run. If more of my fandom and friends were on IJ, I'd probably not bother even cross-posting to LJ. Hell, I've even got JournalFen and Inkscribe journals, not that I do anything with them. But if a majority of fandom or even just the fandom I'm in went there, I'd at least have a presence.

When Dreamwidth was just a poll asking what people wanted from a journaling service, I'm pretty sure I commented that I'd buy a permanent account if it had everything. But I don't have the two hundred extra bucks right now. (Well, I do, but it's earmarked along with every other spare dollar for a new laptop which I need or posting and the Internet are going to be moot points anyway.) I am planning to buy at least six months paid time though.

When it comes to permanence, I'm sort of setting my hopes on the OTW and The Archive of Our Own when it moves out of beta.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

The longer I'm online, the more I want permanence and the less I feel that true permanence is really achievable. Of course, I've lived in two states and at least six different apartments/houses over the last fifteen years, and I've had a half-dozen different computers, so what is permanent, really?

I feel more optimistic about the OTW archive than I did in the beginning; it really struck me as one of those flash-in-the-pan projects that gets dropped when the principles move to other things, but I have been really impressed with the commitment and dedication that the developers have shown, and I like the interface -- I'm thinking about getting an account now when they're out of beta.

In the beginning, at least, I expect I'll probably treat DW similar to how I currently treat IJ -- I'll have a placeholder account for flist management and commenting, and other than that, I'll probably just follow the herd (moooo). I don't have any particular emotional investment in LJ other than having been here for several years and being comfortable with it (and used to all its quirky little ins and outs; I even find myself typing LJ code in my HTML by accident).

[lavvyan.livejournal.com]

I'm comfy, I have everything set up the way I like it, and most of my currently active online social circle is here.

Yeah, ditto, and not all of them are part of fandom. I figure I'll see how I'm going to handle this - the Great Exodus to IJ turned out not to be so great after all, so who's to say Dreamwidth will fare any better? Plus, there's also the Archive of Our Own to consider; I guess change is coming one way or the other.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I actually have two LJ accounts, one of which is, obviously, this one, and the other is a personal account that I mostly use for keeping in touch with old college and work buddies -- that one, clearly, is not going anywhere, since my flist is almost entirely non-fannish and mostly consists of people who blog infrequently anyway. My flist here is entirely fannish, however, and I guess I'll just watch what they do.

You're right about the Great IJ Migration, though. There's really no telling what the shape of fandom is going to be a year or five years from now. The only thing I really know for sure is that it will still be somewhere.

[amalthia]

I'm not exactly sure what Dreamwidth is yet or what it offers that's different from LJ or even the OTW archive.

But I'm kind of used to fandom moving and shifting formats. My main hope is the next shift is to a better story posting journaling system. LJ with the 10k word story limit kills me and is my biggest pet peeve about LJ. It's a great community place not a good story archiving place.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

LJ with the 10k word story limit kills me and is my biggest pet peeve about LJ. It's a great community place not a good story archiving place.

I definitely second THAT! I don't know what the limits are on DW, although I suspect it's probably been bumped up; I know the comment limit has gone way up (I think it's going to be 16,000 characters?) and one of the developers is an active fanfic writer who writes epics, so I would not be surprised if it's gone up a lot.

I don't have any good "all about Dreamwidth!" posts bookmarked, though I know I've seen a few floating around. I think things will become more clear once the site goes live and fandom starts getting going over there.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I actually haven't given it much thought. Since I've been on lj I've moved between multiple fandom; various anime, and then SV, and SGA, and now I'm poking around MUNCLE. In each fandom I've picked up a few people who become permanent friends, even after we change fandoms; others I drift apart from. (and then drift back together with, as you do in fandom, but that's been going on since long before lj; there's a few people on my lj now who I knew back in my Sentinel days!) So lj never felt that much different to me than mailing lists or boards, though I find it a simpler environment to navigate in.

Though this is partly because I use lj so strictly for fanning; I've never really gotten into blogging my real life, and so I tend to differentiate between fan acquaintances and friends (such as yourself), the latter of whom I keep in touch with on email and other places, so I'm less afraid of losing track of them. If my current fandoms jump ship to Dreamwidth, I'll move with them; otherwise I'll stay here as long as they do.

I am hoping the Archive of our Own achieves some kind of permanency, though, because putting aside the social connections, it would be really nice to be able to find older fics...!

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

You're right that friendship transcends fandom -- or blogging platform! I suppose one of the big things that's making me dither right now is that if fandom *does* end up migrating en masse to DW, I will probably want to follow, and I'll want to take my journal with me (apparently they have a nice LJ-import tool). But that precludes using my DW journal for much of anything unless I want to blow it all away when/if I move the LJ. It's the whole "syncronizing the laptop with the desktop" problem (currently driving me crazy; I still haven't found a good way to do it, and one of these days I know I'm going to screw up and overwrite the wrong version of a file...).

I also keep thinking about a couple of unsuccessful attempts that I've seen in the past to move a community from one platform to another -- the inevitable result in both cases was that the part of the community that survived the move was only a fraction of the original, and much less active. I'm not sure if that'll happen with DW -- there's a lot of enthusiasm about it in fannish circles -- but I don't really want to repeat the experience I've had in the past of following what I *thought* was the herd, only to find that the herd had scattered along the way.

[ratcreature]

Some of the different and planned features of DW seem neat and I'd like somewhere where the new innovations go in directions that make more sense in how I use a journal than they do at LJ, but well, I won't have an account early on because I certainly don't have the $200. I figure once it's grown a bit someone will have an invite code to spare, and I'll set up for crossposting there and maybe import the old stuff if their importer works, and the x-post in three places (LJ/IJ/DW) like I do now in two. I'll make it my main journal if I like how it works and most of my f-list was there, but considering that I have a paid LJ for now, it won't be my main or only journal.

Whenever I post anything I put in multiple places anyway, because I never liked being only on LJ. Years ago I had a blog on my wesite I xposted to, that was actually what I had before an LJ, because fans still did blogging then, and it wasn't totally settled that so many end up on LJ, so I don't just mean LJ/IJ. Also that my recs go to my website, my art goes to my website, my art blog and deviantart and such, so one place more doesn't make much of a difference to me.

[rydra_wong]

I won't have an account early on because I certainly don't have the $200.

You don't need to -- as soon as it goes into open beta, you can buy paid time (starting at $3 for a month, and of course you can still use the account for free even if you don't buy any more paid time), or get an invite code from someone.

and maybe import the old stuff if their importer works

I tested it out a couple of days ago, and it really, really does. *has glee*

[astridv.livejournal.com]

I clicked "I plan to have a Dreamwidth journal for commenting/reading, but LJ will still be my main blogging site." More accurately, I'll crosspost every LJ post to Dreamwidth but LJ will remain my main blogging platform until my main fandom moves over to Dreamwidth; then of course I'll do the lemming thing.

I'm very comfortable on LJ, too, and not crazy about moving. But it sounds like Dreamwidth will come with nifty features, and, more importantly, a good import tool. But what really compels me to make the switch is LJs past behavior towards fandom. The scans_daily affair showed once again that the LJ PTB will throw a fandom journal/comm to the wolves without hesitation as soon as a copyright holder says "BOOO!"... be it justified or not. That they aren't even willing to stop and listen to a possible fair use defense is a huge turnoff... every one of us is wide open to accusations of copyright infringement.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

*nods* I know, and even though my personal experience with LJ has been good, I don't really trust them 100%. The idea of having my content yanked is a bit of a nightmare for me.

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

It will be interesting to watch. One thing I get out of doing the media refs stuff is a sense of how little of the fanfic world is actually LJ-centered. It's annoying how much FF.net is looked to by outsiders as representative, but it's not entirely wrongheaded on their parts.

I just don't see how DW can be what it wants to be. I don't see fifteen-year-olds paying ANYTHING to post fanfic.

I plan to ignore DW. Of course I have no idea what I'll be doing in a year, but I'm just not feeling a pull away from LJ, or a need to add another blogging platform to my online diet.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

I think that all communities get a bit insular and think of themselves as the center of the universe. :D Prior to SGA fandom, I really had no idea that LJ fandom even *existed*; my previous fandoms were focused on mailing lists, privately hosted archives and ff.net. Then this whole new world opened up to me, and now when I get into a new fandom, LJ is where I look for fic first. But the rest of the Internet is still out there...

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to keep both, because there are an awful lot of people on my LJ who aren't in fandom--including my non-fannish communities.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

*nods* I tend to waffle over how much of my personal life to put online; this journal is almost wholly fandom-related, and if fandom shuffles off en masse to DW, then I'm sure I'll go along. I have a (rarely updated) personal journal elsewhere, which will certainly stay put, since it mainly exists to keep in touch with old friends from college and to maintain a reading list of writing/author blogs.

[bratfarrar]

I haven't decided yet, but I'd probably at most wind up cross-posting, with LJ as my main platform and DW as backup/there for people who hate LJ. Or something along those lines. Unless my flist moves, I don't feel any personal reason to shift--I've finally gotten my LJ pretty much broken in and comfortable, and I've got other uses (lots of 'em) for my time than setting up a third online journal account.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm content where I am; on the other hand, I'm not content enough that I'd necessarily balk at moving to a new journal if I end up liking Dreamwidth better...

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I bought a permanent account here! That was probably poor planning; I'd heard of Dreamwidth already, but I didn't know how far in the future it was. Still, my friends are currently here, I have a permanent account, I have fifty icons (and 142 more spaces I can fill!); I figured I'll probably get some kind of Dreamwidth journal, assuming they have some free basic level, to read those of my friends who move, but I like LJ, even with its faults.

[rydra_wong]

assuming they have some free basic level

Yup! Though you'll need an invite code from someone; they're using the invite code system to limit the number of free accounts and ensure that the service can be sustained without ads.

Or if you really just want to use it for commenting and reading, you can set up an OpenID log-in, which will let you comment, let friends give you access to locked posts, and e-mail you notifications of replies to your comments (if you validate an e-mail address).

(No, I have no official status, I'm just all a-squee *g*.)

[trobadora]

I'm planning to open a journal on DW, but what exactly (and how much) I do with it will depend on how much of the activity I'm interested in will actually take place over there. And I'm too multifannish to tie it to any one fandom ... So there's really no way to tell. *g* I'm going to take my time deciding.

edited to fix typo

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

*nods* I started out with a rarely-used free account on LJ and eventually, over several years, ended up with a paid account that I use all the time. My IJ account, however, languishes in obscurity. It really just depends on how much you use it, and for what...

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

I'm more and more suspicious of the way the LJ corporation seems to be heading - they seem less and less interested in providing a service to people like me and more and more interested in providing a service to people who want MySpace. Right now I'm not leaving LJ, but I can see myself getting more and more dissatisfied as things continue (I mean, they *fired* their development team)

So I'm going to get a Dreamwidth Account (well, two) and crosspost for a while and use both and see how things go. I don't plan to abandon LJ yet, but I can imagine doing so in the future.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

*nods* Everything new that I hear about LJ makes me less comfortable trusting them with the bulk of my online interaction. At the same time, though, I have a lot of -- well, inertia, I guess, built up at LJ. I know how it works, the etiquette and the tags and so forth; my friends are here, etc. I know that DW will be very similar in interface, but I definitely don't see myself migrating immediately; I will certainly get an account, but I'll probably be in a "wait and see" holding pattern while I watch what everyone else does and how the social circles form over there.

Lurker...

[dragon-within.livejournal.com]

My biggest problem with other journals other than LJ is that I forget about them. :( I have a Twitter, I have an IJ, but I never use them because the majority of my friends (both fandom and non-fandom) are here, or crosspost from their other journals to here.

Re: Lurker...

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, there is that too! I have an IJ but I never do anything with it.

I, for one, welcome our new DW overlords

[spark-force.livejournal.com]

I've got too many non-fannish communities here that I follow to ever truly leave LJ-- especially the pro-writing community, which seems to have only recently discovered LJ-- but I'll be buying a couple month's worth of an account over at DW to see whether or not I love it. And if fandom moves, I will of course move with it.

And in all honesty I'm hoping that fandom *does* move over to DW, so I can make a clean break between my fandom and real life identities. Back when I started this journal, I didn't care who knew about it, so about 50% of my flist here is people I know from real life. Heck, my mother reads my LJ. But in my old age (/sarcasm), for whatever reason, I've started getting more paranoid about connecting my online identity with my RL identity, so I'd like to separate the two out as much as possible. Or, at the very least, have a place where I don't need to worry about posting things my mother wouldn't understand.

Plus, I hate my current username...

Re: I, for one, welcome our new DW overlords

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Ha, yeah; I went and created a separate LJ from my personal one for fannish purposes. The lines have slowly been blurring, and an increasing number of people who know me in RL now know about the fannish journal, but the original idea was to keep the two separate...

[rheanna27.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty enthused about DW, for a few reasons -- some of which, I admit, are extremely shallow! (For eg: I want to be rheanna over there, and I may hold my breath until I go RED if I don't get that username. ::grin::)

Initially, I was lukewarm about DW, because I thought, Oh, it's another LJ clone, and I wasn't very impressed by IJ or JF. But the amount of development they appear to have done -- improving the functionality of the basic LJ structure -- has really impressed me.

I've come to feel, increasingly, that we (fandom) are not LJ's core userbase. I don't think we ever were, really, we were just quite numerous. I don't know for sure, but my feeling is that LJ's marketing and growth strategy is probably focused on Russia, and I don't want to hang around on LJ until fannish journals and comms are in the minority, and the bulk of the site is aimed at a completely different market. So I like DW because it's very clearly been created for the fannish community with substantial input from the fannish community.

I like it because the structure and set up are professional, and aimed at long term stability and growth. This is my 10 year anniversary in fandom; I've come to realise that this isn't a phase or a fad, this is who I am -- I intend to be in fandom for a long time to come, and I want to feel that the architecture is in place to facilitate that. Like xparrot said upthread, between DW and the OTW archive, I feel like fandom has a good shot at establishing really a solid, permanent infrastructure on the net, and I want that for us.

I've just about been around long enough to remember usenet groups, which were replaced by mailing lists, and later LJ. The big shifts we've seen in the last 10-15 years have mirrored the huge changes which have occurred on the wider internet. The technology has developed at huge speed; maybe now we're hitting the point where the initial explosion of anarchic growth and change is about to slow down and turn into something more stable, which isn't a bad thing or a good thing, it's just a thing, a natural next step.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

It does look like a very stable, solid place for a fan to nest. *g* I think your reasons make sense, and like I said above, I never expected LJ to be my permanent "home" (in fact, I'm surprised at how much of a "home" I've made for myself here).

Your last point, though -- that's really interesting to me! I guess I've just been assuming that something would eventually take over from blogs, just as Usenet and the old listserv-style mailing lists gave way to message boards and Yahoo group-type lists, which gave way to blogs. But now that the Internet's become such an institution (it's been a generation, almost), maybe the rapid change is starting to taper off; maybe we are, if not at a steady state, then at a point where we're likely to see refinement of what's already there more than the rise of something new and different. Hmmm...

[sheron]

I'm actually starting to warm up to LJ again in the last month. (Maybe it's spring? heh). But basically someone let me know that they've FINALLY fixed the stupid spapshots setting so that I can turn them off completely and after that I wasn't as mad at them anymore because at least they ARE fixing some things that I want. I'm giving them the next couple of months to convince me one way or another. If I am convinced they are reforming, I'm staying put, if not I may have to do the whole Dreamwidth thing more seriously.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Right now LJ is doing what I need it to do, and I'm happy with it. My time is paid through next February, so I probably wouldn't be seriously looking into moving somewhere else until then, anyhow. By that time I ought to have a good idea of what Dreamwidth can or can't do, though, and how much of my f'list will have moved over there.

[blucola.livejournal.com]

I'm not leaving lj and I'm not taking in another journal. I've done that during the past lj flounces and I've decided that it's not worth my while, I never visit the other journals.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd call this a flounce -- more like creating an alternative for people who have certain problems with the existing service (and fixing them). Having said that, obviously it's not going to be for everyone, though. :)

[flingslass.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to see that you're concerned with maintaining your flist, I've managed to survive your culls :D I'm going to get a dreamwidth but it will probably be like yours at the moment. There to keep up with comments but who knows. I have an IJ and am on Inksome so will just have to see where fandom goes. I've got into LJ and my flist is important to me (I'm having enough trouble keeping up this year because of school but school's only one year :D) but the thing to me is I'm only paying for one account, I have a permanent IJ.
This comment might be a bit confuzzled but I've just ran a 6k fun run :D